Anu Rao specializes in the historical anthropology of caste; anthropology of violence; history of gender; political theory; colonial genealogies of human rights and humanitarianism.  Her work has focused on theorizing caste subalternity, and in exploring the critical role of anti-caste thought (and its thinkers) in producing alternative genealogies of political subject-formation through the vernacularization of political universals. Her book, The Caste Question, addresses the relationship between caste and democracy, between stigmatized personhood and acts of political commensuration, even as it explores their relevance for rewriting the history of secular liberalism in colonial and postcolonial India. She has also written on the themes of colonialism and humanitarianism, and on non-Western histories of gender and sexuality. Recent publications include: Discipline and the Other Body (Duke University Press, 2006); “Death of a Kotwal: Injury and the Politics of Recognition,” Subaltern Studies XII; co-editor of “Violence, Vulnerability and Embodiment” (a special issues of Gender and History, 2004), and Gender and Caste: Issues in Indian Feminism (Kali for Women, 2003).